Jan Švankmajer is a renowned Czech filmmaker, who has been continually cited as an immensely influential Eastern European animator. His influence can be said to have had an impact on the western cinema of animation as a whole, even though at the start of his career as a filmmaker his work was screened by the Czech communist government, and later nearly completely repressed from 1970s to the 1980s – in fact it was only after that period in which he expanded from his short films into full feature-length films. In terms of origins, his inspirations rise from his childhood experiences, Czech surrealism, communist censorship suffered and the folk tradition of Central Europe, especially notable for drawing on gothic influences.
The degree of progression from this early film, and the influence of joining the Czech Surrealist Group and his marriage to Eva Švankmajerová, a surrealist painter, can be observed in some of his later work, such as Jabberwocky (1971). This film utilises a variety of found objects not made for the film, brought to life via a wide variety of stop-motion animation techniques. Starting with Lewis Carroll’s poem being read out by a child to the scene of a wardrobe moving through a forest the film is set within the space of a child’s play area , within which, a series of what could be called ‘adventures’ or events occur using inanimate items brought, rather bizarrely to life, that result in the symbolic growing-up, or an escape from childhood.
